Subject: File No. S7-08-09
From: William Mahl

May 30, 2009

I urge you to enact this amendment to SHO.

The recent bear raid on Lehman Brothers is the best example to date of the damage that short sellers can do to a company.

While short selling theoretically may enhance market efficiency of a given stock, large hedge funds and mutual funds that use short sales have the ability to artificially control the market price because of the huge amounts of any equity they can trade.

Applying the proposed amendment will help prevent the phenomena of a stocks decreasing price and unrestricted short sales from feeding each other and result in driving down a stock's price well below any rational level.